


A Personal Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, GaaLeeGaa Holiday Exchange, Gaara Isn't Kazekage, Hurt/Comfort, Hyuuga Neji Lives, M/M, Naruto-critical, Temari Becomes Kazekage, Touch-Starved, anti-war sentiments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:48:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22275874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: The ways in which things could be worse, if everything had gone differently. And the ways in which they could be better, too.A Canon-Divergent AU where Gaara never becomes Kazekage, and Temari does instead.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 30
Kudos: 228
Collections: GaaLee / LeeGaa Holiday Exchange





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kuroashi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuroashi/gifts).



> This is the final pinch-hit for [@baphometsss](http://baphometsss.tumblr.com/) for the [GaaLeeGaa Holiday Exchange](http://gaaleegaaholidayexchange.tumblr.com/)! Sorry this is somewhat belated, but I hope you enjoy it! Happy (overdue) holidays!
> 
> The title is inspired by [The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows](https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/), and the sorrows themselves were mostly sourced from [Reddit's logophilia community](https://www.reddit.com/r/logophilia/).

_eunoia, (n.) - a feeling of goodwill, especially as exists between a speaker and an audience; this word is best known for being the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels_

Gaara is standing in a crowd. All around him are the mottled browns and canvas greens of flak jackets and battle-ready uniforms. The air smells like sweat, like the sticky underside of bandages, like liniment and fresh rubber and sand. His gourd is heavy on his back. He doesn’t recognize the shinobi in front of or behind him. His brother’s face, half-obscured by a Suna uniform veil, is the only familiar visage nearby. It’s loud; too many bodies jockeying for space, raising their voices, airing out old grievances and spoiling for new blood.

There’s a flicker of chakra. The air falls silent. Gaara looks up.

Above him, on the cliff, Temari steps to the forefront of the group of five Kage, her hat drawn low over her eyes. A shiver runs through Gaara. He’s seen this song and dance before, back when it was his father who loomed over them and not the drawn-tight face of his sister.

He should be up there with her, he thinks, protecting her. Himself and Kankuro besides. But the Council refused; they don’t trust his stability, even now as a jounin with a half-dozen S-ranks under his belt, and they don’t trust Kankuro’s allegiances.

“They said I’m too close to her,” Kankuro told him, one night at the bar, after their semi-annual application to join the ANBU guard had been declined. “That it might ‘compromise’ my loyalties to the village, whatever that means.”

Technically they weren’t allowed to be there, but jounin status functions as a sort of semi-legal adulthood in Suna. A jounin can rent their own apartment (though they both still live at the Kazekage manor with Temari), can gamble their wages in one of Suna’s flophouses (though only one of them does this with any regularity), and can kill a man with their bare hands (or sand, or puppets). So if one orders a beer and happens to be a few years shy of the legal drinking age? Well, most bartenders are willing to look the other way.

Kankuro slammed his beer on the bartop; the glasses all down its span rattled. “Of course I’m close to her! I’m her fucking brother!”

Gaara sipped his water and said nothing. The reasoning he had received from the council was altogether harsher.

“You’re lucky we still let you run around wild,” said Councilwoman Fuuji of the Southern Flats, staring him down over the rim of her glasses with a beetle-black stare that pierced him like a thousand senbon. “It’s only owing to your parentage and your sister’s status that you aren’t caged like a dog.”

 _I’d like to see you try and cage me,_ Gaara had thought then, and still thinks now. _I may not be so unhinged anymore, but if you threatened me or my family I would crush you in an instant._

“Listen, Gaara-kun,” Mataru of the Shield Mesa had said, smiling at him beatifically. The familiarity of the honorific crept up Gaara’s spine like unwelcome fingers. “You’re a smart boy, aren’t you? A genius? That’s what your test scores said. Incredible, really, since you never had any formal education…”

 _Thanks to you, and the rest of your like,_ Gaara thought. Beneath his placid exterior, a storm rolled in.

“So you must know,” Mataru continued, his voice smooth, diplomacy belying the cutting intent of his words, “that you’re wasting all of our time? You’re a valuable weapon, certainly; and we’ve accorded you a status that equals that. But we could never put the Kazekage’s life in your hands. Suppose you snapped again?”

“I would _never_ hurt my sister,” Gaara said lowly. Though he longed to cross his arms over his chest, he kept them fisted at his sides.

“Of course you say that now,” Hosoichi of the Creosote Clan interrupted their stand-off. He leaned back in his seat, a chair made of bones too familiar to be animal. “But, well. We’ve seen _people_ like you before.” He said the word with a sneer. It was clear on his face that he didn’t believe Gaara to be a _person_ at all. “Those who claim they’re _reformed._ And your … shall we say, _transformation,_ has been nothing short of miraculous.”

Tamagi of the Lightning Fist coughed into her hand. Gaara cut his eyes at her. Though he was sure she thought he hadn’t seen it, he saw the flicker of a hand signal behind her handkerchief. _Wrap this up._

Hosoichi sniffed. “At any rate, we know what happens to shinobi like you. You’re brittle as forged glass. Strong enough in a windstorm, but the slightest bit of downward pressure, and- ”

 _Crack._ Underneath Akiro of the Sand Boulder’s fingers, spiderwebbed fissures were spreading down the council table. The expression he wore was thunderous. Unsurprising; Gaara had killed his younger brother during an assassination attempt when he was eight.

Gaara turned his attention back to Hosoichi, staring him down.

“So you see?” Hosoichi spread his hands. The false smile on his face spread until it nearly touched his ears. His eyes were hard points of brown stone in his face, though, unmalleable and unwavering.

“I see,” Gaara had said. And he had _seen._ He just hadn’t seen what they wanted him to see.

“What’d they say to you?” Kankuro asked him, wiping the foam of his beer from his upper lip. He was just starting to grow in a patchy, stubbly imitation of a mustache there and refused to shave it. Flecks of white clung to the sparse black hairs.

It was loud around them. Two chuunin on a bender after an A-rank had just started singing, badly out of key. They clanked their glasses together and beer sloshed to the floor, the smell of yeast strong in Gaara’s nose. In the toilets, someone was getting sick. It was, for all appearances, a typical night. But this was still a shinobi bar, and that meant the Council had eyes and ears everywhere. Gaara watched the ripples spreading in the surface of his water glass as the two chuunin danced by, giving his gourd a wide berth.

“They said the same to me,” he lied.

In the valley below the cliff face, Gaara’s neck starts to hurt from craning up. Temari has been standing there, silent and imposing, for a long while. The shinobi around him are growing restless, muttering. He can’t see her expression. He wonders if she’s nervous. Does she feel the growing unrest on the desert floor below her? Or is this--leading a united fighting force of shinobi from the Five Great Nations--what she’s always dreamed of?

“I don’t know why they asked me to do this,” Temari says, her voice amplified by a jutsu and spreading across the gathered crowd. “I’ve never been good at sentiment.” She extends her hands. They look tiny and pale beneath the voluminous sleeves of her Kage robes. “But here we are, so I’m going to tell you what we’re fighting for.”

_elucubrate, (v.) - to produce by working long and diligently; to burn the midnight oil_

Temari personally arranges their squadron for the war effort.

Gaara’s team is a five-man squad, a combination of long- and short-range fighters, an array of various specialists with diverse jutsu. There’s a sallow-faced young chuunin from Iwa, a hyper-religious genjutsu specialist who keeps making warding signs at Gaara's back. Gaara considers snapping at him that the demon’s been pulled out of his body for months now, but propriety stills his tongue. Their scout is a keen-eyed kunoichi from Kirigakure, who speaks much but says little. Gaara isn’t sure if she does this to distract herself, or to distract her enemies from the way her seeing-eye jutsu senses out their movements three steps ahead. A thunder-voiced jounin from Kumo serves as their sealing expert, the broad span of his back belying his deft hand with a scroll. And their short-range fighter is Rock Lee, from Konoha.

“You like him, right?” Temari asked, over the piles of scrolls in her office-cum-war-room. “Lee? You saved his neck that one time.”

Gaara had given little thought to Lee since the last time they crossed paths, at the chuunin exams hosted in the Demon Desert.

“He’s … loud,” he said, finally.

Temari smiled, that sharp-edged expression that looked more snake than woman, and passed him his mission scroll.

Lee _is_ loud, that much hasn’t changed. He seems to think anything worth doing is worth overdoing, takes too-long strides when he runs, moves his hands this way and that when he talks, laughs with his head thrown all the way back and his voice booming.

They travel under the cover of night, sleeping during the day when it’s easier to keep watch. This is no hardship for Gaara, who sleeps little, even now without Shukaku raging within him, but the rest of the team drags. Lee especially yawns theatrically when they rise after sunset, bones cracking in his back when he stretches.

“I apologise,” he shouts to Gaara one night, as they hop through the trees on the border of Wind Country. “I am just not used to keeping such hours!”

The boy from the Hidden Stone falls to an Edo Tensei reanimation, a former rogue nin from Earth Country who was either the boy’s elder brother or his uncle. Gaara manages to seal the reanimated corpse, but not before it’s too late for the boy, trapped staring under a genjutsu while the corpse’s waxy hand jammed a sword right through his heart. His blood pools on the underbrush and stains Gaara’s sandals.

Gaara never even learned his name.

“We should burn the body,” Lee whispers, as Gaara is considering whether the sword in the boy’s chest is worth taking. “Otherwise, they might come back and … do _that_ to him, too.”

“He wouldn’t want that,” the girl from the Mist interjects, the shine of her sharp teeth and the whites of her eyes all that’s visible under the moonlight. “His religion says that bodies have to be buried whole, or the soul can’t travel on.”

Gaara wonders how she knows this, but then remembers how closely the two had lain their bedrolls.

“We don’t have a choice,” says the tall man from Lightning. “Either we burn him, or he could come back and burn us.”

“What if they see the fire?” the girl asks, but from the tension in her voice Gaara knows she’s just seeking an excuse. “It would lead them right to us.”

“Then we need to be gone before that.”

Lee has a pouch full of timed exploding tags, specially designed by the weapons expert on his team back home. They wrap the body in them and Gaara lights them with a flicker of chakra.

By the time the forest is ablaze from the boy’s body, over the Kiri kunoichi’s stammered objections, they’re miles away.

She’s the next one to fall, when a tripwire launches a poison needle straight through her neck.

Her body, too, vanishes behind them in a plume of black smoke.

By the time they arrive at the battlefield, Gaara and Lee are the only ones left. The pouch that held Lee’s exploding tags is empty, flapping at his side. Across the plain, Gaara sees the figure of his father, and Temari holding her own against the magnet release with her fan outspread.

Gaara lifts Lee on his sand without thinking as he flies towards her, glad to have an ally at his side.

_anastomosis, (n.) - the connection of separate parts of a branching system to form a network, as of leaf veins, blood vessels, or a river and its branches_

They flow together, then back apart.

Lee has a genin team, now, he tells Gaara in letters. Each with their own personality quirks and specialized jutsu and a story that comes laughing off the page in each of Lee’s neatly written scrolls.

Gaara has … nobody. He has his brother and sister, of course, though they’re at the office more than they’re ever home. Kankuro has finally been accepted to Temari’s ANBU guard, alongside her scandalously foreign-born husband. There's little for Kankuro to commiserate with him over, now that he’s been let in and Gaara is still shut out. And what can they talk about, when everything that happens in their lives behind closed doors is classified? Twice a year, Gaara still shows up for ANBU interviews, and though he knows all the questions, passes the test with flying colors, the council don’t even bother telling him his results anymore.

Naruto takes Gaara out to dinner whenever he’s in Suna, which is rarely, and smiles like the sun when he does it. He talks to Gaara like they’ve never been apart, but it seems that he forgets about Gaara the second Suna’s gates leave his sight. He never writes, though Gaara’s sent him a few letters. And Gaara still trains with Baki from time to time, but he’s never been a true match for Gaara’s unfettered chakra, demon or no demon, and he’s getting older now, his motions slower, his hand-signs less crisp.

“I saw a dog with five legs today,” Kankuro offers once, during a rare dinner when they’re all home.

“Don’t be crass,” Temari snaps at him. Though she’s young, there are already crow’s feet growing at the corners of her eyes. Gaara found hair dye under her bathroom sink when he was cleaning the week prior, and there’s a slowly spreading patch of grey at her roots.

“It’s not a euphemism!” Kankuro protests.

Shikamaru rolls his eyes and silently passes Gaara the pitcher of water he’s been eyeing.

“Is it always like this?” Gaara asks, out of the corner of his mouth.

He can see Shikamaru weighing the degree to which this information can be shared in his narrowed gaze.

Finally, he sighs. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Kankuro pushes back from the table with a screech of his chair. He stretches his arms over his head and scratches his stomach.

“Thanks for the meal,” he announces loudly. “Good stuff. Now I gotta get back to that stiff under Block Three.”

Temari clears her throat and makes a warning gesture. Kankuro pales under his paint.

“I mean, I gotta get back to the office,” he corrects himself.

As Kankuro clears away his dinner plate and gathers his ANBU mask from its hook by the door, Gaara thinks he must not have noticed the blood edging his fingernails.

_thole, (v.) - to endure; to suffer_

The assignment of a joint mission comes as a relief.

Gaara meets Lee and their third, a chuunin kunoichi named Moegi, at the gates to the Leaf Village. It’s not an especially high-stakes mission, just the delivery of a scroll to Lightning, something that’s of import to both their villages. It would be nothing more than a B-rank if it weren’t for the reports of rogue ninja gathering on the border of Steam Country, war orphans and battle-hardened survivors with a taste for the blood of the Five Nations on their tongues. Grief makes formidable and unpredictable foes.

“Make sure they aren’t trying to pry it open,” Temari warned him before he left. “That information is highly classified.”

Gaara doubts Lee would stoop to any such thing, and Moegi seems almost as upbeat and guileless as Lee, but he keeps a close eye on the scroll nonetheless.

They’re halfway out of Fire Country when Moegi falls ill.

“I don’t know how much further I can keep going,” she says, eyes bloodshot after losing her lunch into a nearby bush. “You guys should go on without me.”

“Do you want us to escort you back to the village?” Lee offers.

She waves her hand, then looks vaguely seasick from the motion. “No, no, go on ahead. I’ll just rest here awhile then turn back. I would be useless up against those ronin anyway, especially compared to you two.”

Lee’s face crumples into a considering pout, tapping his finger to his chin. His brow is furrowed, like he’s trying to reason through a better strategy.

“Fine,” Gaara answers for both of them, taking his feet. “Feel well soon.”

Lee yelps, but follows him into the trees as they leave her behind.

The mission progresses amicably after that. In the absence of a third party and the pressures of war, Lee is an easy conversationalist. He doesn’t seem to mind how little Gaara speaks, but he reacts with delight at even Gaara’s one-word responses. He walks too close, sometimes, looks at Gaara for a beat too long over the fire, but Gaara feels safe with him.

Everything is going well until they cross into Frost.

There’s a span of ice across a ravine, and Lee runs across it easily. The ice shakes under his feet but holds him. Gaara follows, and that’s when the ice cracks. He falls. Wind rushes past his ears and his vision whites out at the sight of the sheer cliff face streaking past his eyes.

Thirty feet above the valley floor, his sand catches him. But he’s traveling far too fast. His leg plunges through the sand platform. When he wrenches it back, he hears a crack. Pain, bright and blistering, blazes up his leg and settles in his chest. He bites back a scream.

Lee slides down the side of the cliff and meets him on the ground below.

“What happened?” he gasps.

“I think it’s broken.” Even without unwrapping the bandages around his ankles or raising his pants leg, he can tell from the scythe of pain that something is very, very wrong. The sand writhes up from the gourd like an agitated animal, snapping and spiraling.

“Isn’t the sand supposed to protect you?” Lee’s eyes are wide, his hands hovering over the wounded limb, looking frantic.

“It can’t do anything about internal injuries,” Gaara grates out through gritted teeth.

Lee’s hand moves gradually towards the injured leg. “Can I take a look at it?”

The sand slaps at his hand, formed into claws. Lee’s mouth sets.

“I can’t help you if you won’t let me see it.”

It’s hard enough to control the sand's impulses under the best of circumstances, but with white-hot pain covering his body like a blanket of nettles, the notion is almost impossible. Gaara bites the inside of his cheek and the sand moves to push at his jaw, trying to stop him from hurting himself.

Lee watches him warily until he nods. _Go ahead._

His hands are gentle on Gaara’s ankle, but Gaara still winces away. The sand lashes, so Gaara bites himself until he tastes blood and distracts it from Lee’s approach.

“I’m going to have to take your shoe off to look at it.” Lee's hands are already at the fastening of his sandal, carefully prying the shoe off with steady hands. Gaara realizes, dimly, that this is the first time someone has touched him since- since-

He remembers carrying Lee back to Konoha after their failure to rescue Sasuke Uchiha, the way his long arm slung over Gaara's shoulders, the sweat-rank heat of his body, the medicinal smell of him, the crushing proximity.

Has it really been so long?

Lee peels back his ankle wrappings, steadily, gently. As if he were unwrapping a swaddled child. He pushes the hem of Gaara's pants up, and his fingers drag lightly across the bare skin. His ankle is clearly broken, the telltale blood bloom of a closed fracture already bruising the skin.

“Do you know any healing jutsu?”

Gaara shakes his head. He’s tried a few times, especially after seeing the war wounded in the hospital after the Great War, but the green shine of healing chakra doesn’t come naturally to him. He fumbled with it, killed more lizards and scorpions than he likes to recount. His hands, his chakra, are made for death, not for life. And their medic is two countries away.

Lee is still cradling his wounded limb, holding it close to his body so he doesn't jar it. It hurts like nothing Gaara has ever felt before. Over the roar of blood in his ears, he can feel Lee's heartbeat where his foot rests against Lee's chest. His heart is racing.

“I’m going to have to set the bone, then,” Lee says. He rips a strip of fabric off one of his legwarmers and rolls it up. “Here-” He holds it out to Gaara. “- bite down on this.”

His face is drawn, his typically broad smile collapsed into a straight line. Gaara places the rolled fabric in his mouth.

"This is going to hurt," Lee warns.

"It already hurts." The words come out muffled.

"Yes, but … not like this."

The motion is mercifully swift. The pain is unreal. Gaara screams so hard he thinks he blacks out, stars swimming behind his eyes. When he comes to, Lee's jumpsuit is pinned in four places by the sand, his body sprawled upon the cold earth. He's still gingerly cradling Gaara's foot.

Gaara dismisses the sand with a flick of his hand. Lee sits up cautiously, still not letting him go.

"Are you all right?" Lee's mouth barely moves, the words hesitant.

"I could ask you the same."

Lee turns his head slowly, inspects the holes plunged through his suit. The hand that isn't holding Gaara's leg pokes at one, idly. His finger pops out the other side of the fabric. He grins.

"Nothing a little darning won't fix. No lasting harm done!" He pats absently at his hip pouch. "I don't have anything to make a good splint." He scans the horizon. "And there's no trees for miles. We'll just have to wrap it until we can get you real help."

Gaara chafes at the notion that Lee's help is anything but _real._ It's more than almost anyone else would have done in this situation, with the sand growling and threatening them.

Lee's motions as he wraps Gaara's leg are careful, almost tender. He tugs gently at the bandages, eases his fingers under their span to check they're not interrupting his blood flow. He checks in with Gaara all the while, his voice as quiet and lilting as Gaara has ever heard it. If he had even the slightest chakra control, he would have made an excellent medi-nin, Gaara thinks.

When the bandage is tied off, Lee's hand smooths over Gaara's bare knee. It's then that Gaara realizes he's shaking. From adrenaline or something else, he can't say.

Lee frowns. "It's pretty bad, huh? I have some analgesic in my kit, if we can get you somewhere to prop that leg up. … Can you stand?"

Gaara just stares at him, his voice gone. The fabric still in his mouth tastes like wool fiber and old iron. Slowly, he pries it out, nods his head.

"I'll help you, of course." Lee is all reassurance as he eases Gaara's foot to the ground, all grace and care as he crouches to slide his arm around Gaara's waist and help him to stand.

They struggle to a nearby rock. With every step, Lee whispers encouragement into Gaara's ear, praises him for his efforts. His breath is warmer than even his panic-hot skin. Once Gaara is seated, tilting uneasily with his leg up on Lee's bedroll, Lee strokes his hair. Gaara's eyes widen. Seeming to remember himself, Lee draws back.

"Right," he says, and kneels at Gaara's feet, fumbling in his pouch, "painkillers. Hey, do you remember when you did this for- ?"

"That was years ago."

Lee passes Gaara the pills, and Gaara chews them to an acrid powder in his mouth.

"Oh." The color leaves Lee's face by degrees. "I think you're meant to. Swallow those." He offers his canteen. "I have water?"

Gaara takes it and drinks gratefully, lets the water wash the medicinal taste from his tongue.

"It will take a minute for those to work."

Something is rattling. Gaara looks around for its source. Dimly, he recognizes his own hand trembling on the canteen's neck, sending the fastener that holds its strap clattering. Lee's gentle fingers lift his chin. It's hard to make out Lee's expression over the fog hazing his eyes.

"I'm worried you're going into shock." Lee opens Gaara's pack without asking permission, pulls out his blanket and draws it tight around his shoulders. "I'm going to call for some help."

Gaara's hand grabs for him as he turns and stands. The blanket falls from around his outstretched arm.

"Don't," he says, and his voice sounds like it's coming from across a great distance, strange and plaintive in his ears. "Don't leave."

The hard, determined expression on Lee's face softens. His mouth parts. He takes Gaara's shaking hand in his firm and bandaged one and squeezes.

"I won't," he promises. "I just need enough space to spread out my scroll."

Gaara recognizes the summoning scroll once it’s opened. Lee mentioned it earlier in their journey, somewhere between the trees. It’s his sensei’s old summoning contract, passed on to Lee since the dysfunction of Gai’s leg made it useless to him. His former teammate has retooled it to respond to blood instead of chakra.

Lee’s hand is bleeding, now. There’s so much blood, running down his arm between his bandages, slapping wetly to the bare earth. Gaara feels lightheaded.

There’s a spark, like static electricity in the air. A _pop_ of displaced space.

Standing on the scroll beneath Lee’s bleeding hand is a tortoise. The creature is easily four times Lee’s size, braced on sturdy legs. Carved into its dark green shell is the symbol of Konohagakure.

“Wrap that up, snappish!” the beaked mouth orders, and Lee scrambles to obey. “You’re dirtying up my shell!”

“Oh, Kunokame,” Lee says. “I was expecting your brother.”

“He’s busy,” The tortoise’s voice is high-pitched, strange to hear coming out of such a large creature’s mouth, “so you’ve got me instead.”

“Busy?”

“Did you bring me here for a charming conversation, or is there something you needed my help with?” she barks.

“Right!” Lee scrambles into a salute. From Gaara’s vantage point, he’s little more than a streaky green blur. A stripe of red still trails down his arm and drips to the ground at his feet. He thinks the painkillers must be kicking in; everything is going hazy. Lee grows and shrinks in his vision: first immense, then miniscule.

“I need your help transporting us! My- ” Here Lee pauses. Gaara feels the burn of his dark eyes on him. Somewhere far below his consciousness, his ankle throbs. He shivers. Was it this cold before? “My friend, Gaara. He’s hurt. I need you to carry us to the nearest hospital.”

“Is that all?” the old tortoise creaks. “Seems that’s well within your power, strong young thing like you.”

Lee’s face goes red to match the blood staining his bandages. “I don’t want to hurt him,” he admits.

“Hmph,” Kunokame huffs, then waddles up to Gaara, scrutinizing him with narrowed eyes. “You look quite sickly, young man.”

Gaara doesn’t have it within him to nod.

The tortoise turns to Lee. “He’s in a bad way,” she says. The words feel like they take an eternity to register in Gaara’s mind. Beneath the smog of medication and hypotension, a bright flare of panic winds up and seizes his lungs. “Very well,” the tortoise announces, craning her head regally. “Get up on my back, the both of you.”

Lee approaches Gaara from the other side, eyeing his limp posture. “I’m going to pick you up,” he says, “okay?”

Gaara stares at him for a long moment and blinks slowly. He knows he should respond to Lee’s question, but he doesn’t know how.

Lee moves anyway. One arm slides under Gaara’s own, around his back, and the other comes up under Gaara’s knees. Gaara’s head falls weakly against Lee’s shoulder as he stands. His breathing feels shaky even to him. Lee’s rough hand rubs up and down his arm, clutches his body close to his chest.

“Easy does it,” Lee says, as he clambers up onto Kunokame’s back.

“This’ll be fast,” Kunokame warns. “Hold tight to him.” The wind starts picking up around them; everything becomes a blur.

The last thing Gaara feels--before the white lights of the hospital, before the cool burn of healing chakra, before the cast that braces his limb and takes him out of missions for six weeks--is Lee’s warm arms around him, holding him close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kunokame's name is a play on Ningame's. "Ningame" is just a combination of "ninja" ( _nin_ ) and "tortoise" ( _kame_ ), so his sister's name is just "kunoichi tortoise". 
> 
> Unsurprisingly for anyone who knows me, this story grew to be larger than expected. The second and final chapter should be out within a week or so.


	2. Chapter 2

_hypergraphia, (n.) - the overwhelming impulse to write_

Sheafs of paper build up in Gaara’s desk, overflowing with tight lines of cramped, jagged handwriting. He doesn’t know as many kanji as someone of his age and stature should, and his words feel childish when he puts them to page. The whole side of his right hand is smeared with black; it never goes away, no matter how often he washes his hands.

A few of them make it to the aviary, tied tight into scrolls and lashed to a hawk’s leg. Temari has her own personal coterie of raptors, highly trained for time-sensitive missives between villages, but she doesn’t mind if he uses the smaller, slower birds. They’re the same ones Shikamaru uses to conduct his clan business at a distance.

Some days, the skies between Suna and Konoha see more hawks than clouds.

Lee’s letters come by regular post. Gaara tries to see how long he can delay opening them, just for the sake of having something to look forward to.

 _Just finish this mission,_ he tells himself, _and make it home, and Lee’s letter is waiting for you._

Lee’s words are never quite what he’s hoping for. (He doesn’t have a name, yet, for the thing he’s hoping for. Sometimes, late at night, he can feel the sense-memory of Lee’s warm arm around his shoulder. He wonders if it might all have been a dream, a hallucination brought on by shock. Lee has never mentioned it. Then again, neither has Gaara.) But he can hear each sentence in Lee’s cheerful voice, feel his boundless energy in every line of neat script and every carefully crafted stroke.

One late summer day, the height of the dry season, Lee’s team stops by the village. It must have been an important mission, to require two full jounin and one special jounin, but Lee’s teammates stand in the market square laughing as if they haven’t a care in the world. Gaara recognizes Lee’s laugh from blocks away.

Lee has an arm slung around each of them, his shoulders shaking. It’s so casual, so effortless. The civilians in the streets give them a wide, cautious berth, cutting their eyes and talking behind cupped hands. The heavy weight of Gaara’s harness over his shoulders has never felt quite so immense. His gourd drags at his hips and makes his steps slow.

“Lee,” Gaara says, and Lee doesn’t seem to hear him. He’s focused on plucking a stray burr from Tenten’s bun, smoothing her hair back into place. Something in Gaara burns at the sight, the edge of a cloth caught by a candle’s flame and made ragged. He repeats himself, “Lee.”

After an age, Lee turns. His eyes go wide and bright.

“Gaara-kun!”

Neji turns at Lee’s exclamation and studies the space between them. Though his eyes are flat, glassy grey, Gaara feels pinned in place by his scrutiny. He stops in his tracks.

“Lee,” Neji says, his voice clipped, “we’re going to go get some lunch. Come find us when you’re done.”

Lee seems distracted as he turns to bid his teammates goodbye. He slaps Neji’s back before he tells them he’ll see them shortly. Neji staggers forward, but doesn’t fall. The hems of his white trousers drag in the dry red dirt of Suna’s main street, kicking up clouds of dust around him. Gaara’s throat feels very dry.

“Hello!” Lee says. The intensity of the attention on Gaara is crushing. Lee is only a few inches taller, but he feels suddenly very small. Lee raises his hands as if he were about to do-- _something_ \--but they freeze in mid-air. After a cautious moment, Lee’s eyebrows furrowing, his hands drop back to his sides.

 _Wait,_ Gaara wants to say, _what were you going to do to me?_ He does not consider himself a curious person by nature, but that question lights a fire in him hotter than the desert’s sun burning his bare neck.

He breathes through dry lungs. Lee’s eyes are searching his face. The dust is stinging Gaara’s eyes, but he can’t bring himself to blink.

Lee clears his throat, wipes a few grains of sand from his damp upper lip.

“I’m parched,” he says. “Do you know anywhere to get cold tea this time of day?”

Most shops in Suna’s main square still won’t let Gaara in. Temari’s aide does their household shopping, and he gets his uniform replacements from the depot up by the Kazekage tower. Anything else he needs, he asks Kankuro, and waits until he remembers to pick it up on late nights after his guard shift ends. Little parcels that appear in their shared kitchen, tacky with Kankuro’s fingerprints and smelling of greasepaint and copper. Half the shopkeepers have warding signs on their doorposts, thick pieces of blue glass, speckled like eyes and meant to keep him away. They don’t hurt him--at least, not physically--more superstition than real magic, but he has a keen eye for such things, and he won’t go where he isn’t wanted.

In a shadowed alley off the main street, there’s a tea shop with a ragged awning. The old man who owns it is mostly blind, and if he knows who Gaara is, he’s never said. It’s here that Gaara takes Lee, ducking between the hanging panels that proclaim the tea the best in Suna, in colors that might once have been bright.

The tea is only average, but it’s the best Gaara can manage.

“We have so much catching up to do!” Lee nearly shouts, once they’re sitting on low cushions with their legs crossed, only the low span of a table and a tea set separating them. He picks up his sweating glass and drinks from it. His mouth tightens. “Ahh, that is _sweet!_ ”

Gaara squeezes a slice of lemon into his own glass, then reaches across the table to do the same to Lee’s. He stirs their cups with the clinking of a long-stemmed spoon. “I just read your last letter.”

“I sent that weeks ago! They take so long to travel between the villages; you’d think they would have improved that by now.”

 _They take so long because of me,_ Gaara doesn’t say. He can go for weeks on the edge of denial, holding out the promise of that unopened letter, just as a cactus waits patiently for the rain.

“Say,” Lee blurts, scanning his eyes around the shop. There are no menu boards on the wall, and the old proprietor has been sweeping the same spot behind the counter for long minutes. “Do you know if they have food here? I just realized I’m starving.”

Gaara shrugs. He’s never thought to inquire. There are a thousand pages of unspent words building up behind his lips, but what he says is, “I’ll go ask.”

When he comes back, Lee’s moved his cushion to the other side of the table. Now the edges of their two pillows overlap, side-by-side. Lee pats the cushion beside him so hard that little clouds of dust rise up from the fabric.

Gaara shakes his head, and Lee’s face falls.

Gaara sits down beside him. His breath isn’t leaving his lungs right, more sigh than exhale.

Something churns across Lee’s expression for a brief moment, but then he smiles.

“Ah, that’s a shame they don’t serve food!” he says through his grin. He picks up his glass and clinks it against Gaara’s. “This tea is delicious!”

There’s a space no bigger than a handspan on the table between their fingers. Lee’s palms are broad and bandaged, his fingers knobbled from being broken and re-broken. Gaara wonders what it would be like to breach that distance, to make this longing tangible.

A few hours later, once the green of Lee’s back has vanished into the desert, a sandstorm rolls through.

_oxyesthesia, (n.) - abnormal acuteness of sensitivity towards touch, pain, and other sensory stimuli_

It’s the end of the wet season, and they’re huddled between the trees on the border between Fire and Wind, whiling away the time at the end of a mission, until they have to head their separate ways and return to their home countries. The sky is heavy with thick clouds just now spent of the last of the rain, even the ground beneath the tree cover slightly damp with it. The hazy sky turns the light grey, and everything around seems washed out, colorless, even the vibrancy of Lee’s suit and legwarmers dulled.

Lee stretches his arms over his head. His back cracks, and he winces. He shakes a bit of numbness from his left hand and shoulder.

“Does it hurt?” Gaara asks him.

Lee waves it off. “No, no … It’s just the temperature change. It always makes that old injury act up.” He looks down and away, embarrassment writ large on his face.

Gaara leans forward. “I could- ” He falters. _He could-_ If he could find the right words, he could- He could reach out. He could make it better. The ache there is his fault, after all.

“I could rub your shoulders?”

Lee looks up at him. There’s something undefinable in his expression. His lips part, then close again. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, just above the collar of his flak vest.

He nods.

Gaara moves towards him like a man possessed. His skin is itching, sparks blooming in his fingertips and rushing up his arms as Lee unzips his vest and sets it aside.

Lee turns his back to Gaara, lowers his head, exposes the vulnerable nape of his neck. Gaara’s chest hurts very suddenly, all at once. Breath hurtles into his lungs in a single inhalation, sharp, gasping. Lee turns to look at him over his shoulder, concerned.

“Turn back around,” Gaara says, barely a breath. He can hardly stand to be looked at like this, to be seen feeling the way he’s feeling.

There’s a butcher shop in Suna, down past the outskirts of the village proper, where the blood won’t make the villagers unclean. It’s more abattoir than shopfront, bodies hanging whole and in parts in the windows, offal heaped in tidy piles behind the counter. Gaara feels like the gutted wild pigs that hang there on hooks, ribs cleaved open and the silvery chine exposed.

Though Lee’s eyebrows crumple together at his request, he complies.

Shaking, Gaara’s outstretched fingers find the broad span of Lee’s back. Lee’s skin is warm beneath the thick fabric of his jumpsuit, the muscles of his back rising and falling with every breath. Gaara has no idea how long he sits there, one hand out, almost sightless as Lee’s pulse races beneath his palm, then slows.

When Lee’s breathing has eased, Gaara brings his other hand up to join its twin. He smooths his hands out and apart, up over the bulk of Lee’s shoulderblades to the tender line of his shoulder. Up over the firm caps of bone at the top of each arm, and then as his hands slide down, the deltoid, the trapezius, the lattisimus dorsi. Remembering Lee’s naming of the muscles as he’s guided Gaara through taijutsu forms helps keep his mind off the thinness of the air in his lungs.

“Ah,” Lee says, and Gaara freezes. It was foolish of him, to think that he could do this without consequences. That he, a weapon, could touch Lee without causing him pain.

“Am I hurting you?”

There’s a smile in Lee’s voice when he says, “No. Can you press a little harder? I promise, I can take it.”

Gaara digs his knuckles in hard, then harder at Lee’s urging, hard enough to bruise.

“A bit more?”

He puts his whole weight behind the motion, and Lee goes boneless beneath him. A sigh escapes him, breathy, pitched.

“Yes, perfect. Just like that.”

Gaara works up a sweat, working at the muscles of Lee’s back, taut and corded like steel cables. Lee stretches like a cat beneath him, body folded nearly in half, so relaxed it feels intrusive, almost intimate to see him this way. Every touch invites another, stronger touch, the feeling compounding in Gaara’s hands and arms until his whole body blazes with it. They’re so close he can smell the salt of Lee’s sweat, the liniment he rubs into his arms before he bandages them, the oil on the kunai in his hip pouch.

Feeling the heat of Lee’s skin through the fabric of his suit, Gaara wonders what it would be like if there were no clothing between them. If Lee were stripped down to his waist, jumpsuit arms tied around himself, the way he so often is during training. If his skin were damp with the post-rainstorm mist hanging thick in the air, instead of sweat.

It’s so much better than anything Gaara can even remember, just touching Lee without the haze of pain clouding his vision. Lee letting himself relax under Gaara’s hands with neither of them injured, neither of them hurting. Just the pleasure of touch and the breathy sounds coming from Lee’s lips.

With Gaara’s fingers at the base of Lee’s spine, Lee sighs.

“I think that’s good,” he says, his voice almost a whisper.

Gaara nearly digs his fingers in in protest, only stopping himself at the last moment. He doesn’t want this to end, but he doesn’t want to cross Lee’s boundaries either. The only thing worse than having to stop touching Lee right now would be upsetting him, because then he might never get to touch Lee again.

Lee sits up, and Gaara lets his hands drop to his thighs. He can still feel the ripple of Lee’s skin beneath his fingers as he clenches his fists in the fabric of his pants.

Lee turns around, his expression open and easy. A broad smile sweeps across his face.

“Do you want me to do you now?”

Gaara’s mouth drops open. He doesn’t know how to respond.

“Your gourd gets pretty heavy, doesn’t it? Painful?” Lee reaches out with both hands.

Gaara has considered, a few times, swapping the gourd for a more convenient model. Particularly when Kankuro traded in the hulking bodies of his puppets for lightweight summoning scrolls, and Temari forewent her largest fan in favor of a belt of smaller ones that grow with an infusion of chakra. But the gourd’s bulk is something of a comfort now, its weight reminding him that he’s protected from almost anything. Though no amount of heavy, chakra-rich sand can protect him from this feeling.

If Gaara were strong, he would decline. He would let this, just this, be enough. He would let the memory carry him on the long nights between letters, the interminable hours between when a scroll postmarked from Konoha arrives and when his thumbnail finally breaks that seal. But the lingering heat of Lee’s skin on his hands makes him greedy. And Gaara has never been strong.

_You’re brittle as forged glass. Strong enough in a windstorm, but the slightest bit of downward pressure, and-_

He unshoulders the gourd.

“Yes?”

Gaara nods. His mouth is suddenly bone-dry, dry as the desert far from an oasis, dry as stone worn away by the shriek of a sandstorm.

Lee tugs him into place, turns him around and arranges Gaara between his legs, then rises up on his knees. Lee’s thumbs find the base of Gaara’s neck … and the grit of the sand armor.

Gaara bites his lip. Then, with a closing of his fist, the armor cracks off and begins to slough away, retreating sulkingly into the open mouth of his laid-aside gourd. Behind him, Lee laughs, just a puff of sound and breath against the bare nape of his neck.

Lee touches him, light as bird feathers, and it’s all Gaara can do to keep from crying out. Lee’s touch is perfect, his hands skilled and sure, and he takes Gaara apart with just a few well-timed presses of his thumbs. Gaara loses track of time beneath him, lost in the way Lee’s broad palm smooths down his spine, the way Lee’s fingertips work all the tension from his shoulders, the stroke of Lee’s fingers along the red indentations where his gourd’s harness digs in.

All too soon, Lee reaches the base of Gaara’s spine, and Gaara wants to _scream_ at the fact that it’s almost over.

Then Lee says, “Turn around? I’ll do the front, too.”

Gaara turns. The tree is behind him now, and he leans against it as Lee’s hands cup the ball of his shoulders, soothing the tightness corded under Gaara’s collarbones with his thumbs. Lee inches closer, and Gaara can see the beads of water in his hair like dew caught in spider silk, the focused line between his eyebrows, the soft, full pout of his lips. Lee’s hands move down, and Gaara very nearly trembles.

Lee is touching him in places he’s never been touched before. He wants more, wants Lee to touch him everywhere, in the places he’s never even touched himself.

Lee’s hands are smoothing up the tense muscles of his chest, where Gaara's posture crumples and hunches over itself when he’s writing mission reports late at night. Lee’s fingers work the tendons of Gaara’s neck, until his head is listing back and he’s panting. A small sound escapes him that he hadn’t even known his body contained--halfway to a moan. If desire were rain, Gaara would be a monsoon.

Lee’s fingers still.

“Did I hurt you?”

 _Keep going,_ Gaara wants to say. _Don’t stop. Please, never stop._

Gaara shakes his head. He would stay like this forever, blissfully disassembled by Lee’s warm, strong hands. He wonders if Lee would let him, crowded as he is between Gaara’s spread legs, soaking up the heat of his flushed skin with his bandaged palms.

Lee’s fingers crawl up past the clenched muscles of his jaw to brush his hairline. His fingers catch the raised edge of Gaara’s scar and remind him why this can never be. _A monster who loves only himself. Who lives only for himself. Who kills only for himself._ Gaara’s not so far away from that, even now.

He closes his eyes, unwilling to face the rejection on Lee’s face, against the pain that springs up at the gentle pass of Lee’s thumb across the brushstrokes, not quite physical but something deeper, something worse. There’s no doubt Lee is moments from pushing him away.

“Gaara-kun,” Lee says. His breath is warm on Gaara’s face. When Gaara dares a glance, the corners of his lips are drawn down, expression serious. Lee’s eyes are boring into his. Gaara has never felt so _seen_. Lee’s stare almost burns him.

“Can I kiss you?”

_nyctaphonia, (n.) - hysterical loss of voice during the night_

Gaara finds himself constantly astonished by the things he loves in Lee that he never expected to even notice in another person. As a child, when he thought about love, he thought about death: killing for another person, dying for them. Now, when he thinks about love, he thinks about the way Lee spends long moments in the mirror, carefully combing every strand of hair into place. He thinks about the way long eyelashes cast shadows on a cheekbone, the way Lee burns more than half the things he cooks.

Lee has stubble in the morning. It’s odd, something Gaara never considered about him, looking at his smoothly shaven daytime face. But the last time he saw Lee just waking up, it was during the long trek of the war. And they had been only children then, 15, 16. Before now, before this morning when he wakes with Lee’s arms around his waist, a different weight along his back, protecting him. Insulating him from even the fear that whispers in his ears late at night.

Gaara’s hair curls in the dense heat of Konoha, and Lee delights himself over running his fingers through it again and again, kissing the crown of Gaara's head and the shell of his ear until Gaara has to leave.

 _I love him,_ Gaara thinks weeks later, as Lee kisses him up against a tree trunk, on a branch forty feet off the ground. As Lee moves his fingers up and under Gaara’s shirt, rubbing at the peaks of Gaara’s nipples until Gaara gasps.

 _I love him,_ Gaara thinks on Lee’s couch between missions, when Lee works his knee between Gaara’s spread legs and rubs in-out-in until Gaara comes, gasping against Lee’s throat.

 _I love him,_ Gaara thinks, watching Lee’s blush rise high on his cheeks after Gaara bluntly tells Naruto he’ll be spending the night at Lee’s, tonight. As Naruto’s choking on his ramen broth and Lee is sputtering and, under the bar, Gaara reaches over and grips Lee’s thigh in his hand.

 _I love him,_ Gaara thinks, pressing Lee up against the rough stone wall behind Ichiraku, his jounin blues around his ankles while Gaara sucks him hard and fast. While Lee tangles a hand in Gaara’s hair and bites the knuckles of the other so he doesn’t make a sound.

 _I love him,_ Gaara thinks, working Lee open, while Lee’s face-down on his bed back in Suna. When it’s been just moments since he snuck Lee into his room, masking Lee’s chakra with his own. As afterwards, he throws the windows wide and lets the sun bleach the smell of them out of his room, so his siblings won’t be suspicious.

Shikamaru notices, though. Because he’s as skittish as a deer, constantly hypervigilant, darting away at the slightest sign of unrest.

“I heard Lee was in town,” he mentions over dinner. “Didn’t get the chance to see him though. He normally comes and says hi. Shame.”

Shikamaru won’t say what it is he knows, but Gaara sees it in the arch of his eyebrow.

“Did he visit you, Gaara? I know you two are close.”

“Yes,” Gaara says, and nothing further. Shikamaru won’t push it; he’s shy of conflict, anything that’s too much effort.

As Shikamaru turns back to his rice, muttering to himself under his breath, Gaara wonders if he’ll tell Temari.

“You know, Rock Lee keeps requesting you as his partner for missions,” Temari tells him, as he’s filing his reports. “He wrote me a letter directly himself.”

Gaara wonders if she thinks he’ll ask to see it, ask for evidence of Lee’s feelings for him laid out in stark black and white. He won’t, because he has a hundred such letters locked tight in the back drawer of his desk, some of them so well-read the creases have faded entirely.

Temari is supposed to know everything that happens in her village, but she doesn’t know the name of the thing that grows in her brother’s heart. The dark impulse of it. The longing. The words he bites back behind his teeth.

There’s a new mission scroll in her hand. Her nails, once finely manicured, are chipped where they press into the sealing wax.

“Well, he can’t come with you on this one,” she says, and her eyes shine. “But maybe the next.”

“I love you,” Lee had whispered into Gaara’s ear, as the sweat dried between their bodies.

The moon outside Lee’s window was high and cold.

Gaara opened his mouth, but he couldn’t say anything at all.

_sublunary, (adj.) - belonging to this world as compared to a better or more spiritual one_

Gaara’s bare feet are resting on Lee’s, his toes curling in the knit of Lee’s legwarmers. Lee hands him a cup of coffee, and he takes it gratefully, the burn of the ceramic beneath his fingers grounding him.

There’s a fat barrel cactus in the middle of the table between them, its flesh bulging and puckered from overwatering, the gray tinge of its skin speaking to the bacteria no doubt teeming within. It seems to Gaara, at that moment, a perfect metaphor.

“The whole village is rotten to its core,” he says. “Not just Suna. Konoha, too. All of them.”

Lee’s dark eyes flicker. In them, Gaara sees all the hidden sadnesses he isn’t supposed to know: the loss of Lee’s teacher’s leg, which leaves him staggering from pain by the end of their Sunday dinners; the cursed seal on his best friend’s forehead, still burned in bright green despite Tenten’s nights of unremitting effort; the expensive, wasted unsealing scrolls in the back room of her shop, where she cooks the books to keep herself out of the red; the long, empty halls of the orphanage where Lee spent his lonely childhood.

“There are some good things,” Lee says. “They’re training more medical ninja. Sakura just opened a children’s mental health clinic. They raised the academy graduation age, too. It’s fifteen now.”

Gaara stares back at him, mouth pressed to a flat line. The thin ceramic cools beneath his cupped palms. He thinks about Suna's council, their prejudices, the thick vein of corruption that keeps their pockets full and their villager’s pockets lean. He thinks about the aquifer project Temari has been trying to get off the ground for years now, the one he only knows about by hearing her yell about it through her office walls, the one that would mean they could reduce water restrictions, but that keeps getting stymied because the only suitable location is beneath a councilwoman’s sprawling estate. He thinks about the children he’s seen in Suna’s hospital, dead-eyed with missing limbs after missions, crying from phantom pain. A line of burnt bodies, consecrated by war. Those who survived, and what little is left of them. He thinks about Suna's academy, and how someone like Lee would never even be allowed to set foot through its doors. He thinks about Kankuro’s nightmares, the whimpers he hears through the floorboards when Kankuro sleeps, the dark circles under his eyes, almost as heavy as Gaara’s own. He thinks about Temari’s hands shaking on the handle of her teacup, a ligament in her wrist torn from overuse but she unwilling to admit to even the slightest weakness, lest she be deposed. He thinks about the crooked demon seal on his belly, which pains him even now.

Lee reaches across the table and holds his hand.

“Have you talked to Naruto about it?”

“Why?” Gaara can’t remember the last time he had a conversation with his friend where he got a word in edgewise, the last time they talked of anything but Naruto’s myriad complaints about the paperwork he’s subjected to under Kakashi’s tutelage.

“You two have always been so close.”

Gaara shakes his head. _He’s_ always been close to Naruto. He can’t say for sure if it’s true the other way around. He sighs. “No. He still thinks becoming the Hokage is a noble goal.”

Lee frowns. “Isn’t it? A tightly held aspiration, only achieved through hard work and the support of one’s esteemed friends and colleagues … wouldn’t that be an achievement worth celebrating?”

Gaara purses his lips. He pokes at the base of the cactus on the table between them. The soil is too wet, the needles limp.

“Celebrate it,” he echoes, hollow. “And then what? Send men to fight and die? To kill? To come home wounded and get patched up just to be sent back out again?” He breathes heavily through his nose. “The end of the war was supposed to be the beginning of peace. But with too much peace, what need do we have for shinobi? For Kage?”

“But your sister- ”

“My sister was seventeen and didn’t know what she was taking on,” Gaara snaps. He looks down at his hands, palm-up on the table in front of him. In the pink light of the sun setting through Lee’s kitchen window, he can almost see the blood on them.

“She’s sent me to kill people anyway. Innocent people, whose only crime was knowing too much.” He looks up at Lee. “I know you’ve done it too.”

Two weeks ago, Gaara tracked down a merchant from whom Suna had commissioned sealing scrolls, the only of their kind, back when his father had been Kazekage. He’d killed the man in his home, defenseless. Hadn’t even needed to use his sand.

When he looked up from the flash of the kunai in his fist, wiped the blood off his cheek to the pleased rattle of the sand in his gourd, he’d discovered himself being watched. The merchant’s young son, no more than four or five, standing in the doorway, staring at him with tears and terror in his eyes.

Gaara should have killed him. He couldn’t afford to be seen. But when he raised the blade, the boy flinched away. A tiny sound escaped him, no more than a whimper. He was clutching a teddy bear with ragged fur and one eye missing, and he raised it up like a shield. Gaara’s hand froze midair. He couldn’t bring himself to finish the strike.

Instead, he slipped behind, silent as a whisper, and grabbed the boy by the neck. Pressed against his carotid artery with two fingers until the boy slumped forward, limp and unconscious. Then he carried the boy to the doorstep of the hospital, where he’d be found by morning.

Gaara watched from afar, hidden behind scrub bushes, chakra concealed, for nearly an hour. Nobody came, even as the boy twitched and stirred. The night was cold, and the boy’s body shivered; he could die of exposure before morning. So Gaara flicked his fingers and shattered the hospital’s glass door--glass was only heated sand, after all--and fled as soon as he saw a nurse come running.

He’d lied on the mission report upon his return, listed _’no witnesses’_ where the boy’s name and estimated time of death should have stood.

“He’ll remember you as the person who saved him,” Lee says.

Gaara looks up with a start. He didn’t realize he was speaking aloud.

“Will he?” he asks to still the panic in his chest. If it had been anyone but Lee just now, he would have been hanged for treason. “Will it be enough to wipe away the face of the same man who killed his father right in front of him?”

In his mind’s eye, Gaara sees the open wound of revenge stretched wide, a gaping, bloody slice that stretches across the whole of the Five Shinobi Nations, cut all the way down to the bone.

“And then if he grows up and comes to kill me,” Gaara continues, “who takes their revenge on him for my death? When does it end?”

Lee is silent for a moment. Outside, a vulture flies past his window, its carrion cry low and mournful.

“You’re talking about defecting,” he says, the understanding dawning on his face.

Gaara shrugs.

“Do you think they would really let you go?” His eyebrows raise and disappear beneath his bangs. “They’d come after you, you know they would. Someone with your power?”

“I don’t think they could stop me.”

Lee’s mouth drops into a deep frown.

“You’d never know a moment’s peace!” he protests. “And you don’t want to kill people anymore? What about the shinobi who get sent to retrieve you? Are they any less innocent than that boy, if they’re just following your sister’s orders? And your sister--oh, god.” Lee’s head is in his hands, now, but his mouth is still moving a mile a minute. “How would she handle it? And your brother? And--and me?” His voice cracks at the end of the question.

“What would you have me do?” Gaara wants nothing more than to reach across the table just now, to take Lee’s hands in his hands and tell him everything will be all right. But he doesn’t know this, and he refuses to lie.

Lee looks up. The dark of his eyes is as brittle as the ceramic glaze of his coffee mug, cracking under his clenched fingers.

“What if you retired?”

_poikilohydry, (n.) - the lack of ability to maintain or regulate water to achieve cellular homeostasis, as of resurrection plants, plants which can recover from dehydration without loss of function, and thus seem to rise from the dead when watered_

Lee finds him in the back room of the Yamanaka Flower Shop.

It's nearing evening, Lee’s classes at the academy done for the day. Sai and Ino left for home long ago, and Gaara volunteered to stay behind and close up shop. There hasn’t been a customer in hours, and every surface in the shop is sparkling clean, every plant perfectly tidied and trimmed and ready for the next morning, when Gaara will unlock the doors and live the same day all over again. It comforts him, the routine, knowing that every day is just the same as the one before, and will be just the same as the one after.

“Are you ready to go home?”

Gaara clips the last of the brown stems from a rosemary bush, pockets his shears and snaps off a stem for their dinner.

Lee’s crutch is under his left arm, and he’s leaning on it heavily. Ever since a mission gone wrong in Wave Country re-opened the muscle tears on his left side, he’s had to rely on it more and more. There’s a thin crack in the metal, right beside the hand grip.

“It’s broken?” Gaara gestures to the place where the composite is bowing under Lee’s weight.

Lee grimaces.

“Ah, little Houki-kun thought he was pulling a very impressive prank this morning.”

“I hope he knows better now.” Lee’s students are much too old for childish pranks, now that they don’t even graduate the academy until they’re almost adults. But perhaps that’s better, Gaara thinks as he hangs up his apron, that they still retain that childish spark, when such things had been years crushed out of him when he was Lee’s students’ age.

Lee smiles. There’s a wall of sunflowers on the far wall behind him, all soaking up the late evening sunshine. He’s brighter than all of them.

“He has quite a few push-ups he needs to do,” he assures Gaara. Though Lee will do them with him, no doubt. There’s a beat, then: “I made up the guest bedroom after classes let out. For your brother’s visit.”

Gaara picks at the rosemary stem in his pocket. Its woody, herbal scent creeps from between the fabric. Lee raises an eyebrow, eyeing the twitching of his hand until it stills.

“Do you really think he’ll stay?”

“Of course he will!” Lee beams, and Gaara smiles back at him, lips closed and feeling shy under the intensity of Lee’s certainty, even after all this time.

Gaara summons up a handful of sand from a nearby planter, cups it in his hand and presses it to the crack in Lee’s crutch. A pulse of chakra, and it’s sealed up and whole again, at least for long enough for Lee to get it back to Tenten for yet another round of repairs.

The walk home is slow, because Lee moves slower now. And because he stops to talk to nearly everyone they pass: the old lady who owns the steamed bun cart, one of his student’s mothers, hurrying home with her arms laden with groceries. Lee leans on his crutch with one arm and holds Gaara’s hand with the other. When Lee starts to lose his balance, gesturing too passionately with his mobility aid and leaning on his bad leg, Gaara holds him steady. Lee doesn’t let go even as he volunteers Gaara’s services in helping close up the old lady’s cart for the night, and in carrying the heaviest of the grocery bags to his student’s home. The mother offers them to stay for dinner, but Lee declines on both their behalfs.

“Gaara’s cooking tonight!” he booms. “He’s an amazing cook. You should come by and have dinner with _us_ sometime!”

Gaara doesn’t have to say a word, and that’s exactly as he wants it.

At long last they return to their small, modest home at the edge of the village: painted dark green, with window boxes overflowing with Gaara’s succulents, and the empty land out back that Lee keeps swearing he’ll turn into a dojo when he retires. Not that Gaara thinks he’ll ever _truly_ retire, and not that running a dojo counts as retirement anyway.

Gaara changes into his pajamas, and waits patiently while Lee presses tender kisses to the scar on his chest, the way he does every night. It’s the place where Gaara held his sand back, and Lee sliced into him with a kunai, deeply, on their last joint mission. Lee still has a sand-burn scar on his wrist, Gaara a silver line of tooth marks on the inside of his cheek from that day. Lee held him gently as they both waited, until they knew there was nothing even Suna’s most skilled medi-nin could do to save his left lung. They blamed it on an enemy nin who didn’t exist, who, by their report, the sand crushed into oblivion, leaving behind no body. It was such a risk, but now Gaara has this: a book of pressed flowers on their bookshelf, one for every day he spent in Suna’s hospital, waiting to recover from his surgery, when Lee visited him every day (and one more, for the day Lee finally brought him home to his tiny apartment, once all the paperwork was filed away).

And now he has this: the comforting clatter of Lee putting the kettle on in the kitchen while Gaara inspects the guest room, checking Lee’s perfectly creased corners on the bedsheets and the gently fluffed pillow in its pillowcase patterned with turtles. The windowsill that Lee has cleared of dust and replaced with a few of their jollier cacti, the ones that are in bloom with pink and yellow flowers. A nightlight, plugged in just beside the closet, for Kankuro’s nightmares.

Now he has this: the sun setting behind the tree line through their kitchen window, while Gaara stirs a hearty beef stew and Lee stands with his head on Gaara’s shoulder, arms around his waist and rubbing the eternal soreness of the seal on his stomach.

“I love you so much,” Lee says into the back of Gaara’s head, over the bubbling of the food on the stove.

“I love you, too,” Gaara whispers in reply. From the tightening of Lee’s arms, he knows he’s been heard.

Now he has this: his heart in bloom, and Lee beside him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comrade Gaara says, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."


End file.
